Category Archives: Business At The Speed Of Thought

Finding the money, dreaming big and spending small

Infiltrate The Media To Draw Attention To Your Business

If you’re not a super star or a celebrity, or even a leader in your field….yet….then you may have to be a bit inventive and persistent to get your business noticed and mentioned by the mainstream media.

If you’re at, or near, the beginning of that long and winding road of getting yourself noticed in order to boost your business, here are a few tips that can really help you, I think.

First, the media and the reporters in it may not know who you are but they won’t care if you can help them.  Get it?  It’s part of that “What’s in it for me?” syndrome. What’s in it for them, is that they can get the information and background resources and quotes they need for an article.  What’s in it for you, is that you get your name and the name of your business mentioned, and that you are positioning yourself as an expert on your subject.  That can go a long way.  In fact, it is a ride you can take all the way to the top.

Pamela Slim in her blog, Escape From Cubicle Nation writes on this in Eight ways to get media exposure to boost your business although I’ve only picked two to talk about.  (You can go to her blog to see the rest, if you like.) Pamela  cautions: “Always respond to queries exactly as asked.  If you see a general query which asks you to include a specific email header, do that.  If not, it will probably mean that your response will not be seen, since the journalist may have email filters to sort queries. ”

So this is Pam’s take, and I agree that both of these are terrific ideas:

  • “Be a resource to your circle of clients and partners.  One of the best moves I have made is to join Help a Reporter Out (HARO), a three-times-a-day listing of press queries run by the indefatigable Peter Shankman.  I scour it religiously each time it hits my email box, respond to queries that relate to my expertise right away, and forward on those that fit friends and colleagues as well.  Some of my friends and clients have gotten press as a result which is a totally fantastic thing.  A rising tide floats all boats, and this definitely applies to your network.  Joan Stewart of The Publicity Hound also has good tips.”

There is a similar new service,  @micropr on Twitter, designed to leverage Twitter for PR professionals and journalists,  enabling journalists to communicate directly with communicators to get help with stories, share

Twitter PR Strategy
Image by ogilvyprworldwide via Flickr

pitching preferences, announce coverage changes, or solicit entries for awards and similar events. The difference between this and already popular HARO, which comes out 3 times daily is that the new @micropr is almost in real time and uses the explosively popular Twitter platform. No harm in using both.

  • “Set up a system to make it easy to respond to press queries.  I have an email template that includes a brief bio, a link to my press page, and contact information.  That way when I see a specific query, I don’t have to type in all that new information each time. In the lucky case that you are asked to provide a photo, have a good one handy on your desktop to send to reporters (I recommend both a high resolution image for print and a low resolution image for online).”

In fact the more you can get, not just your publicity, but your whole business on a system, the better off you will be.  Then you can save much of your time for the big things: the big problem, the big new presentation, the big new customer, and, with a lot of work and perseverance, the big new bank account

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Green Tech – Next Boom Or Bubble Set To Burst?

My company is located in the high tech corridor that runs between San Antonio and Austin, Texas, so I am more than a bit familiar with the wild swings and boom and bust cycles in both high tech and housing.

I was slam bang in the middle of the dot com bust of 2001, having gotten on the Net with the pioneers at the onset of Netscape and the graphical browser. I remember the wailing and the moaning.  I even remember a “friend”…… a rather cliche-ridden friend, and not such a rock solid friend, it turns out… saying: “Rather see ya than be ya.”  Even in the midst of the crash and the doom and gloom, I retorted,”Are you kidding?  A very small per cent of the people are on the Net yet.  It’s in its very earliest stages.  Bubbles are about over hype and not real profits.  The Net is the future.”

Of course, I had kept my costs low and had to make a profit.  I didn’t have a venture capitalist leaning over my shoulder and breathing down my neck saying “Capture eyeballs, forget profit.  It’s a real estate grab and a race to critical mass.”  I was slowed down by the need to build a profitable business now, not later.  And, that turned out to be a good thing.

So the question is, will green tech be the next big bubble that bursts?

Here’s how I look at it.

Business is all about cycles.  If a particular sector becomes overheated and rampant with speculation, there  naturally are going to be some wild rides.

Let me put it this way.  If you got all excited about real estate values booming and put your money down on two high dollar condos in Miami or a couple of spec houses in Phoenix, you may have to walk away from your investment with only your experience to show for it.

If, on the other hand, you bought your own home, or a rent house in Phoenix, at a reasonable price, you can just live in it, or rent it out for enough to cover the mortgage, for two or three years or most of your life.  The real estate market will recover and your investment will recoup its losses and continue to rise. All you need is time.  And, if you structure your investments or your business right, you will have time.

Time is the answer to most investments and most businesses.  Time to grow.  Time to accumulate…..assets, customers, understanding, markets. Time to ride out the downturns and take advantage of the upturns.

That’s why it’s so important to conserve your cash, and if you’re a small business or an entrepreneur, run your business with an eye towards thrift.  That will give you the ability to withstand the sometimes sudden shocks and typhoons that hit the market and your business in particular.

If you create a business that offers real value, and you are careful with your cash, you will survive and thrive.

Green business, or the green tech sector, is no different I think. It offers a lot of value and increasing efficiency for the future.  It is only at the very beginning, as the Net was in the 90′s.  It’s a good time to get in before the field becomes incredibly overcrowded.  Will it be here for the long term?  I would make a serious bet on it.  In fact, I am making some serious bets on it.  Just put on your hard hat for that inevitable fall out when the speculators have climbed too high and created an avalanche of nay sayers.  But that, too , will pass. And you will still be there to reap the rewards.

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A Viable Path To Bootstrap A Startup

I have bootstrapped a number of startups in different industries. If you’ve been following this blog, you know that bootstrapping consists of using your own brain, wiliness, sweat equity and resources, rather than have a bank or investor fund you.  Which ….99 to 1…. they won’t anyway.  So it’s a good thing you’re looking at bootstrapping

And in the current economic climate more people are looking at bootstrapping…. or freelancing as an entry into bootstrapping… than perhaps ever before.

There are a number of tried and true formulas, which will help you bootstrap, and we’ve shared some of those before.  But the advice that follows stands out, in part, because the author,  Evan Carmichael, YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager, takes some of it a step further.  We always tell you to outsource.  But Evan discusses how to stairstep your outsourcing from free labor to part time help, to hiring full time, which is exactly the smartest way to do it, I think.

Well, here’s Evan himself in YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog » 7 Steps To Build A Startup From Scratch With No Money.

“I recently did an interview about how to build a business up from scratch with little or no money and I used my own story as an example.

Here are the steps that I took.

This process helped me build my business with $0 in startup capital.

Hopefully you can learn from my experience and make it even better.

Step 1: Moonlight Until You Find Something That Works

I’m a big believer in not spending until I’m earning so I started my company while working at a venture capital firm in Toronto. I used my site to drive traffic, expose myself as an expert, and drive leads for the venture capital firm. I was driving thousands of people to my website and began to wonder if there was a way to monetize that traffic beyond lead generation for the venture capital company.

I found out about Google AdSense and put it up on the site as an additional revenue generator. In my first month (January 2005), I made $8.38 – not much to write home about.

Step 2:  Tweak, Tweak, Tweak

Too many entrepreneurs jump full in with no plan and no proof that your idea will work. It’s always better to tweak the concept while you already have some sort of stability in your income. I wasn’t about to go full time making $8.38 a month.

My next step was to learn as much as I could about how to better optimize my ads and how to drive more traffic to my site. I read every ebook, blog, newspaper article, and website that I could get my hands on. There were a lot fewer resources than there are today. I learned as much as I could in the extra time I had and implemented the ideas I learned. Slowly I started making more and more money.

Step 3: Go Full Time

I looked at how much I was spending on my apartment, food, entertainment, etc and once I started to hit that revenue number with my website, I jumped ship and did my business full time. It wasn’t a lavish lifestyle by any stretch but I wouldn’t have to worry about paying my monthly bills. I knew that if I was able to build a site in my spare time that could support my entire lifestyle, then if I gave it a full go, I would be able to do much much more!

Step 4: Get Free Help

As your typical entrepreneur I wanted to grow very quickly and took on too many responsibilities. I was doing manual data entry when I should have been doing more value-add work. But that manual work still needed to get done. The solution? Get free interns. I started with foreign language interns. They were basically university students who came to Canada on a student visa for work experience but they couldn’t get paid for the work. I couldn’t give them too many communications projects because English was their second language but I was able to unload a lot of the work off of my plate.

The next free help I got was from high school students who were on a co-op term. I was able to give them more tasks where they were able to connect with partners and customers because they were fluent in English. They sounded very young on the phone so they usually stuck with email.

Step 5: Hire Part Time Help

At some point you’re going to need more skilled labor than the free interns. They were a stepping stone to help you grow and take some of the work off of your plate but you’ll eventually get to the stage where you need people who don’t need as much hand-holding. But you don’t have enough money coming in to support both you and them. The solution? Hire part time workers. The first guy I hired was for one hour per day to update my database. He worked for me for five hours per week which was much more easy to manage. I wasn’t going broke and I got a skilled worker to help me grow my business. It wasn’t as fast as I would have liked, but it was growing nonetheless.

I hired people to create code for my website, write articles, do marketing projects, edit content, sell advertising… almost anything you can think of. But they were all part time to start. I had an entire organization running with people working only a couple of hours per day. The good thing was that they worked every day… so every day we made progress forward. I found people using elance as well as hired friends and family who wanted to help as well as make an extra pay check. At one point I had eight part time people working for me.

Step 6: Hire Full Time Help

Just like you eventually outgrow your interns, you will also eventually outgrow your part time help. At some point you’ll realize that it’s too much work to co-ordinate all the various part time staff and you need more from them. Some may be able to step into full time roles while others will not be able to commit to more hours because of the other jobs they have. You’ll likely end up having less workers but will get more work done. For example, when I hired my marketing manager, he was originally one of the guys working for me on a part time basis. By hiring him I ended up not needing four other people who were working with me in marketing related positions part time.

Step 7: Figure Out Your Job Description

This is where I’m at now. What is it that I love to do and who do I need to hire to take over the jobs that I don’t want to do anymore? In January I brought on two new full time people to free up more of my time. When you’re first starting a business you end up wearing all the hats but as you grow I believe the whole point of entrepreneurship is to do something you love doing. If you have the opportunity to design the perfect job, why not go for it?

I would love to hear your thoughts on how you’ve built your business up or how you plan to do it if you had a $0 budget.”

For more pearls of wisdom on entrepreneuring, from Evan and others like him, go to YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog

And if you have any thoughts yourself on bootstrapping or entrepreneuring, and you’d like to share them, we’d love to hear them

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Do You Have The Entrepreneur Temperament?

Andrew of BizLaunchBlog offers this on the entrepreneur temperament. Do you see yourself in here?  Do you see even a little of yourself in here?

Signs you’re probably an entrepreneur

  1. You business is your life and hobby
  2. You often do and then think
  3. You don’t like being told what to do
  4. You often have dreams about your business
  5. You constantly find ways to innovate everything
  6. You hate small talk
  7. You don’t REALLY read long contracts even though you say you did and recommend people should
  8. You’re very impatient
  9. You hate standing in line(queue if you’re English) to buy something
  10. You hate meetings
  11. You look forward to Mondays
  12. You have a short attention span
  13. You don’t read long emails
  14. You send out short emails and sometimes people think you’re rude
  15. You hate being told you’re wrong

If you think this is you, don’t just sit there, go out and start and business!

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A Tip Of The Hat To New Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, Tech Veteran

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz

Former Autodesk Chief Executive Carol Bartz, 60, will be the new CEO at Yahoo.  And that’s a Yahoo! for a woman playing with the big boys in the hallowed tech preserve.  And another kudo for not backing down when the pundits start sharpening their knives for her.

Bartz has a long string of successes so she is well equipped for the job:

Tons of awards, but who’s counting?  The point is Bartz has smarts, experience and moxy.

Some of the pundits have quibbled that she’s a manager and operating person not a Mergers and Acquisition guy.  Did anyone here see Wall Street?

We thought the goal was to run a company, not necessarily sell it or break it up and sell the pieces.

In an online conference call today, Bartz confronted the pundits head on and came out swinging:

“Let’s not put ourselves in some crazy timeline. Let’s give this company some frigging breathing room. Everybody on the outside deciding what Yahoo should or shouldn’t do–that’s going to stop,” she said. Her first meeting with Yahoo’s managers was set for 10 minutes later, she also said. Another moment came when asked about how her background at a company selling software to companies would serve her at an Internet company selling ads and serving a large consumer audience. Bartz was quick to slap down the doubts about her expertise as nonsense.”
“I didn’t know CAD (computer-aided design) when I joined Autodesk, I didn’t know hardware when I joined Sun,” she said. “I have brain power to understand what it takes.”

Now there’s a woman who knows who she is and is about to show us all.  A tip of the hat to Bartz and our hearty congratulations

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Free Tools To Communicate, Collaborate Or Learn

I have a new virtual friend who I think is very smart and offers up some great tools.

Here’s what he has to say about himself:

My name is Olivier (30 years old) and I live in the South of Paris, with Yasmina.

I worked 3 years in the area of Alternative Education then that of Human Rights. After which, I decided to go back to my very first hobby as a teenager: computing. So back to school ! Half time studying and half time working.

Two more years in a SSII led me to another employer : this time I was asked for by a training center that chose to develop on elearning activities. I can say I was part of the rising and the evolution of the start-up during 4 years. It soon became the French leader of professional training in elearning solutions!

Here are 4 of the tools that Olivier offers.  I’m sure there will be more as I find these very valuable and useful. Give them a try and let me know if you agree, or have your own alternatives to offer:

SparkAngels

SparkAngels claims to be the first online coaching service. It is a collaborative tool limited to two people: a user and his coach, the SparkAngel.

VoIP communication and instant messenger allow the two people to communicate. The service makes it possible to access the desktop from distance and to guide the user through popups for instance. Technically there is no need for any communication port but downloading may be required (Java Webstart app).

The aim is to tackle digital exclusion to give a solution so that ” skills among certain types of population may be shared with other people unfamiliar with technology“. The thing now is to develop places where those people get access to computers and benefit from the solution.

There is a professionnal offer too, it is possible to customize the application with personal logos instead of SparkAngel ones. Darty, a French company, chose their solution last month and proposes a distant DartyBox support. DartyBox is a French box to provide internet connexion, VoIP and video ;)

Widgets should soon be available to be inserted in websites to facilitate the relation between users and SparkAngel.

Combattre l'exclusion numérique en s’adaptant aux besoins de ses utilisateurs à venir avec des services qui les aident à s’approprier la toile

DimDim

A true virtual class. Slides import, desktop and applications sharing, audio and video communication, multi-users instant messenger, invitation by mail. DimDim may be integrated with Moddle and Sugar CRM.

The DimDim license is GPL, hosted on sourceforge. Important features are currently on development phase: quizz, recording, links with Outlook and Google Calendar and so on.

Uncommon: the official website explains that “The Dimdim open source edition is meant … for usage in Non-Critical Environments … The Enterprise Edition is a much more stable, scalable and reliable piece of software which is fully supported and certified by Dimdim, the company. The Open source community supports the Open Source edition“.

The company provides you with professional services regarding technical bugs and helps you with the tool.

The Dimdim open source edition

dimdim, une classe virtuelle open source

demo

Elluminate

I read about it on elearning.fr, Elluminate provides a Java virtual class limited to 3 users but free! The look and the features are similar to the Centra Symposium virtual class. I used Centra for five years, here is a screenshot here. Except for its old looking, it seems to be a complete solution and the company offers professional services.

Elluminate

Streaming Rooms

Streaming Rooms provides free virtual rooms to organize your online meetings.

You can publish one or more video feeds: perfect if you want to aggregate videos from different users in a meeting! Only communication is based solely on chat, there is no password protection, no possibility to publish diaporamas, no download zone… it seems the virtual class is dedicated to individuals only.

I found out that Jessy Cyganczuk, the streamingrooms developer, has built up the application in one week end, before going on holidays. Today he is concentrating on other projects :D

The service, that points out functionalities of an open source framework – CakePhp, makes me think that:

  • it is necessary to test thoroughly any new 2.0 tool before considering it is worthwhile
  • the development for 2.0 tools is not always time-consuming

Organiser vos rendez-vous en ligne

To visit Olivier yourself, go to Free collaborative tools for elearning – [ Blog ocarbone.free.fr ].  It’s a virtual trip to France, after all.

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Need a job? CREATE one! Personal Coaching To Help You

Need a job? CREATE one!

Simply Hired is partnering with Sramana Mitra, Forbes columnist and author of Entrepreneur Journeys, to bring you an online entrepreneurship forum. The open forum will take place on January 14th, 2009 at 11am PT/2pm ET and will center on job seekers taking their careers in their own hands by learning to create jobs now.

During the 60-minute session, Sramana Mitra will answer participant questions in real-time about all aspects of entrepreneurship including:

* forming a business idea

* finding great mentors

* funding your business idea

* mistakes to avoid

* anything else participants might ask

The session is open to everyone, however only the first 15 participants to register will have the opportunity to interact with Mitra.

The forum is free to all participants and will be run on the Dimdim Web Conferencing platform. To register for this event, go to http://entrepreneurshipforum.eventbrite.com or visit http://www.dimdim.com.

Check out the press release for more info!


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Goals – Got To Have Them

Let me tell you first what Seth Godin, marketing guru, author and blog celeb has to say about this subject: The thing about goals.

“Having goals is a pain in the neck.

If you don’t have a goal (a corporate goal, a market share goal, a personal career goal, an athletic goal…) then you can just do your best. You can take what comes. You can reprioritize on a regular basis. If you don’t have a goal, you never have to worry about missing it. If you don’t have a goal you don’t need nearly as many excuses, either.

Not having a goal lets you make a ruckus, or have more fun, or spend time doing what matters right now, which is, after all, the moment in which you are living.

The thing about goals is that living without them is a lot more fun, in the short run.

It seems to me, though, that the people who get things done, who lead, who grow and who make an impact… those people have goals.”

And I would add to that, if you don’t have a goal, you can wind up selling yourself short, leaving money on the table.

Let’s say you have a blog, a website, a brick and mortar business or a career,

Just to pluck some imaginary, hypothetical numbers out of the air, let’s say you’re making $80,000 a year. ( I know, you might be making $30,000 and I’m not feeling your pain.  Or you might be making $250,000 and I’m insulting you, not giving you enough glory and limelight. Just bear with me.  These are hypothetical numbers, ok?

I know I’ve been in situations where I was making $80,000 ( hypothetically) and vowed to make more from that particular business.  But I didn’t set a goal, so I didn’t form a detailed strategy and set out the concrete steps it would take for me to get there.  I might have made more money.  I might have gotten to 100K.  But if I didnt do the planning I would just keep on doing whatever I had been doing and not tie all my actions to specific steps to reach that goal.  Even if I reached $100K, I would never know if I could have reached $200K instead.

And wouldn’t we all have rather reached 200K instead, (or a million or whatever your hypothetical goal might be)?

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How To Recognize When You Need A Virtual Assistant, What They Can Do

I absolutely believe in delegating.  If you’ve worked hard, been persistent and had just a tad of luck, you will reach the point where your business has grown enough that delegating becomes mandatory.  You’ll know when that point comes.  You won’t be able to handle all the work on your plate.  You are working longer hours, getting tired.  Your family starts grumbling that they don’t see enough of you or get enough of your attention.  Your spouse starts asking about plans for the week-end and you, with a dazed, far away stare, start muttering about a difficult client or a tech system that crashed.

In short, you’re no fun at all and you’re not having any fun either.  Work which was once invigorating is now becoming a series of painful tasks you hope you can complete. The diagnosis is simple. You need help.

And if it takes more convincing, recognize that, sure as the sun will come up in the morning, without help, you will burn out, your business will start a long down hill slide, and somewhere along the way down your family will start wondering if this grumbling workaholic they find themselves living with is worth putting up with at all.

So, you know.  You’ve arrived at that point where help is no long a nice idea.  Help is mandatory.

Here’s what a virtual assistant can do for you. In 10 Ways Web Businesses Can Use Virtual Assistants , Rebecca Zwar, a virtual assistant and owner of Social Web diVA offers this bit of guidance:

“The virtual assistant (VA) industry has literally exploded in the last few years. You may have heard of the very popular book, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Richby Timothy Ferris. You might even know of a VA or two. But how do you know when you’re ready to start outsourcing?

Too many small business owners wait until they’re overwhelmed to start outsourcing, either because they feel they’re the only one who can do the job right, or because they fear it’s simply out of their budget.

The truth is that there are many tasks you’ll come across in your web-based business that do not fall within your area of expertise. The right virtual assistant will get you set up, going and on to the next task in the time it will take you to read the FAQ’s! Think of them as your virtual help-desk for developing, implementing and marketing your internet presence. So if you’ve been putting off outsourcing because you weren’t sure where to start, check out this list of 10 Ways Web Businesses can use VAs:

  1. Design and maintain your blog or even website. There are many virtual assistants out there who can get you set up with an attractive and functional blog or website. And unlike traditional web designers, your VA can continue to help you with quick updates and changes, without exorbitant fees or long turn-around times.
  2. Set up your ezine/newsletter. Is your time better spent generating business, or learning how to create and edit an HTML newsletter template? Your VA will set it up and send it out, without needing anything more than a text or Word file from you.
  3. Manage your affiliate program. An affiliate program is a great way to increase sales for your product. But they do require some maintenance. A VA can help with writing promotional copy that draws in good affiliates, as well as manage payment schedules, promotions and more.
  4. Create sales pages or landing pages. Do you have a new product, free report or teleseminar you’re promoting? Have your VA create an attractive landing page that generates lots of sign-ups.
  5. Set up and manage your shopping cart. Shopping cart systems online can range from simplistic to highly complicated. It can be difficult to know which to choose, much less how to set it up for your business. Your VA can help you select the cart that’s best for you, and integrate it with your website.
  6. Develop and maintain your social networking. Social networking was the buzzword online in 2008, and networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter experienced phenomenal growth. The right VA can sit down to create a strategy for your social networking, and help you maintain it so it’s a time-effective, not time-consuming, form of marketing.
  7. Assist with formatting audio or video. If you’re interested in podcasting or producing videos, don’t let lack of technical knowledge stop you. A virtual assistant can take raw audio or video, edit, upload and promote it for you.
  8. Create professional free and paid products. Provide a simple text file to your VA, and they can help you produce a professional product to sell or give away to build your list. Or, work with a VA that offers writing services, and you won’t even have to create the product yourself!
  9. Act as technical support for teleseminars, training calls, webinars, video conferences and more – If you’re not familiar with the systems you’re using, having technical issues can make you look unprofessional or worse, cost you money. Having a VA standing by to help work through any technical issues can be worth the cost just for peace of mind.
  10. Finally, remember that just because you’re a web-based business doesn’t mean that you couldn’t use some administrative help. Let your VA manage your schedule through online calendars, sort through emails, screen voicemails, manage your bookkeeping, or help with whatever task you find is consuming your time and costing you money.

Virtual assistants are more than simply secretaries—they can be business partners that bring essential skills to help you manage and market your business for the best of both worlds. They’ll save you time and help make you money!”

I can tell you, I reached that point in my business and the moment you realize you need help and act on it, your business and your life will change for the better.  You will be able to take downtime to recharge and your business will be able to continue to grow without chewing up the founder in the process.

Just do it!

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Hello Plinky! Hello Jane And Robot ! And Other Tales of Courage

Our hat is off to Jason Shellen! And to Vanessa Fox!  These two brave souls left Google to start their own companies in the midst of a recession.

They don’t talk about gutsy, they epitomize gutsy.

“Jason Shellen, resigned as Google’s manager of new business development in 2007 to launch Plinky.com, a startup that’s designed to inspire bloggers and users of social media sites. Shellen says he was getting complacent working at Google, despite the company’s domination of the Web.”

Vanessa Fox, aka, the Google Lady Webmaster, the most well-known woman among the SEO community, who helped build Webmaster Central, one of the company’s most successful projects took the leap as well. A star at Google, Rand Fishkin,  CEO of Seo Oz, in an anthem to her abilities and webmasters debt to her says:

” I don’t believe that anyone, outside of a few of Vanessa’s close friends, realize how much she’s done to help Google’s public image, their bottom line and their relations with webmasters, nor do most of us know how much Vanessa’s done to fight for webmasters internally at Google. … Webmaster Central was not only Vanessa’s department, it was her baby, her idea (right from inception), her show. If not for Vanessa, we might never have had the dedicated team of webmaster relations specialists (people like Jonathan, Amanda, Trevor, Susan & Maile). We might never have been able to send sitemaps to Google, see data about our sites (particularly the link data, for which Vanessa was always a fantastic advocate), verify ownership, select a preferred domain display or do any of the hundreds of other things that Webmaster Central enables.”

So, to Vanessa’s new company……. Hello Jane and Robot!

Most people in the high tech sector would kill to work at Google.  All that money.  All those stock options. Who could resist?  And why would you want to?

In, CNN.com’s reporting, They left the corporate cocoon to blossom, Shellen says he decided to leave Google despite a shaky economy because he wanted to force himself to change.

“Being an entrepreneur is all about risk and innovation, not timing the market,” Shellen says. “A good idea doesn’t wait for the perfect time to emerge. The ability to build something new outweighed the need for stability.”

Now there’s a person with the entrepreneurial gene.

“Shellen believes the large resources of a company can actually slow down the creative process. A person might want to invent a product, but small things like the name of the product end up being discussed in a committee.

“You don’t find that in a small company,” he says. “At my new company, Plinky, we sometimes dream things up in the morning and by the afternoon have it live on the Web. That never happens at a big company.”

In another example of taking the giant leap, “greater freedom is also what inspired Vanessa Fox to resign from her position at Google. Today, Fox is the founder of “Jane and Robot,” which helps Web site developers ensure their sites can be found by potential customers, and “Nine By Blue,” which helps businesses use online data to better understand their customers.

Fox says the challenge of creating something in an evolving space like the Internet was too great to pass up.

“As hokey as it sounds, there’s more to life than money,” she says. “As much as I loved working at Google, I am really enjoying the flexibility I have now, as well as the ability to really make a difference in the direction I choose to go in.”

If any of these comments sound remotely like something you might say, if you took the leap then Congratuations! You have the entreprerial gene.

So go for it!  Take the leap!  I salute you, too.  We hope to greet you out there launching your new business very soon. ( It certainly beats the cascading pink slips which will engulf many as gloomy economic times drag on and downwards, forcing many companies to cut back.)

In the meantime: Hello Plinky.  Hello Jane and Robot!

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